Steve Keen's Debtwatch

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

URPE–The Union for Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Economics–is hold­ing a Sum­mer School for the Occu­py move­ment, and as part of that invit­ed papers that explained the cri­sis in 1000 words or less (so that they can be print­ed on one dou­ble-sided sheet).  Here’s my effort in some­what less than 1,000 words (though with 2 fig­ures). In the inter­ests of URPE’s objec­tive in this exer­cise, here’s the PDF of this blog post for gen­er­al down­load.

By Philip Pilk­ing­ton, a writer and jour­nal­ist based in Dublin, Ire­land. You can fol­low him on Twit­ter at @pilkingtonphil

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

By Philip Soos

The Con­ser­va­tion

One of the more inter­est­ing out­comes the 2011 Cen­sus pro­duced was the fig­ures con­cern­ing the hous­ing mar­ket. The rea­son for this inter­est is how the results con­trast­ed with the idea that Aus­tralia cur­rent­ly suf­fers from an acute hous­ing under­sup­ply or short­age. Tak­ing the lead in pro­mot­ing this idea is the Nation­al Hous­ing Sup­ply Coun­cil (NHSC), an organ­i­sa­tion formed by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in May 2008 to pro­vide an in-depth analy­sis of the hous­ing mar­ket. The NHSC is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be the peak body in this field.

I’ve just tak­en time-out from the pre-con­fer­ence social event at the Cen­tral Bank of Turkey annu­al con­fer­ence, and (as enjoy­able as that func­tion was) it’s lucky that I did: Mish Shed­lock has fol­lowed up on some crit­i­cisms of my “Mod­ern Debt Jubilee” pro­pos­al with a post on real solu­tions for the debt cri­sis. I will try to reply to Mish’s fol­low-up before I turn in for the night here in Cap­pado­cia.

Below is a video from the 2011 Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence Vision, Action and Lead­er­ship, host­ed by Aaron Wiss­ner. The con­fer­ence used the Del­phi method was used to draw upon some com­mon­al­i­ties and dif­fer­ences around the inter­pre­ta­tion of the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis from pan­el mem­bers, includ­ing Tom Gre­co, Steve Keen and Nic­hole Foss. This fin­ish­ing group inter­view shares an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on the out­comes of this con­fer­enc­ing tech­nique.

By David Law­son

Click here for this data in Excel: Debt­watch; CfE­SI

An issue that is often over looked here in Aus­tralia is the ris­ing cost of edu­ca­tion. Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents are lib­er­at­ed from the up-front cost of edu­ca­tion through the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ments High­er Edu­ca­tion Loan Pro­gram (HELP). While in oth­er coun­tries like the Unit­ed States the stu­dent loans mar­ket is pri­va­tised, which has con­tributed to their high­ly priced ter­tiary edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Though, after look­ing over the num­bers here in Aus­tralia it seems that the pub­lic cred­it fund­ing through HELP could be hav­ing the same infla­tion­ary effect on edu­ca­tion.

Below is Steve’s recent inter­view on Cap­i­tal Account with Lau­ren Lyster that talks about the Debt Black Hole that economies around the world have unknow­ing­ly been sucked into. Steve dis­cuss­es the fun­da­men­tals of his unique analy­sis on using ris­ing debt lev­els to finance eco­nom­ic growth. A fan­tas­tic renewed per­spec­tive on the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis!

Chi­nese con­struc­tion keeps trend­ing down with Sany the worlds sixth largest heavy machin­ery mak­er report­ing a rise in prof­it of 5.4% in the same quar­ter as a blow out in receiv­ables of USD $1.39  bil­lion  and cash reserves falling by USD $535 mil­lion  . Sany is clear­ly book­ing prof­its on 100% financed machin­ery while pro­vid­ing zero trans­paren­cy on cred­it risk  and delin­quen­cy . If the GFC has taught the world any­thing. then 100% ‘no mon­ey down” ven­dor finance should ring alarm bells. This all start­ed about about 3 months ago when Zoom­lion start­ed to aggres­sive­ly financ­ing heavy machin­ery for any­one that want­ed to sign up